human connections across Bering

[mootsman]

That's the best evidence I've seen yet for ancient astronauts.

Thanks for putting that graphic together. It makes the conundrum pretty obvious.

[paleo_joe]

Wow, great graphic. Thanks for that.

Given that the continent was populated, I think a tool would travel much faster then a people. You get it from the tribe to the east, you give it to the tribe on the west.

Either that or perhaps the "clovis people" had something like a religious calling to travel far and wide with their invention.

Either way, 200 years is light speed. I wonder how fast maize, another similar technological breakthrough, spread?

[mootsman]

Originally Posted by paleo_joe

Wow, great graphic. Thanks for that.

Given that the continent was populated, I think a tool would travel much faster then a people. You get it from the tribe to the east, you give it to the tribe on the west.

Either that or perhaps the "clovis people" had something like a religious calling to travel far and wide with their invention.

Either way, 200 years is light speed. I wonder how fast maize, another similar technological breakthrough, spread?

By the time of maize (agrarian cultures) the population was exponentially larger than during Clovis times. And that makes the Clovis technology rapid spread even more incredible. Pretty small population across the continent then and, one would think, large areas of little or no population.

[paleo_joe]

Just googled this up. Even with the exponentially larger populations (good point), maize took longer than 200 years to get across the continent. Closer to ten times that.

"Eventually, maize spread out from Mexico, probably by the diffusion of seeds along trade networks rather than migration of people. It was used in the southwestern United States by about 3200 years ago, and in eastern United States beginning about 2100 years ago. By 700 AD, maize was well established up into the Canadian shield."

[Mojave]

Planting corn is by definition a sedentary activity pursued by sedentary people. You have to INTEND on staying in one place for a while to get the benefits. Corn doesn’t run away from you when you throw sticks and stones at it and it was not quickly dwindling in numbers across the land. If Clovis man subsisted on maize, he wouldn’t have moved so much. But then he wouldn’t have a need for big fluted points either.

[uniface]

Linguistics-based speculation rests on a pretty demonstrably false assumption : that the descendants of the Clovis folk were the ancestors of most (if not all) modern natives. (I.e., languages perish along with the people who spoke them).

DNA stuff is, as far as sophistication, about at the Model T/Wright Bros. stage compared to what it will hopefully be even in 15 years. Right now, they're finding what they can find and using it to establish over-reaching generalisations as "facts."

Attempting to account for the Clovis corrundum using post-pleistocene assumptions comes to grief no matter how the suppositions are arranged and tweaked. As far as congruence with what seem to be the probabilities involved go, they really might as well have been from Mars.

Distribution : For what it's worth, the current "book" on Clovis is that it is not defined (or definable) by fluted points, but by lamellar core and blade technology. In the book (Clovis Technology) I posted the heads-up about, they have Clovis reaching only as far Northeast as Virginia, West Virginia and Southwestern Ohio. Fluted points are found beyond that line (even up into Maine and Nova Scotia), but not the diagnostic blade technology.

[Mojave]

Originally Posted by uniface

Attempting to account for the Clovis corrundum using post-pleistocene assumptions comes to grief no matter how the suppositions are arranged and tweaked. As far as congruence with what seem to be the probabilities involved go, they really might as well have been from Mars.

That is my problem with many of the "theories" that are put out there. People latch onto ideas as though they are proven fact when in reality they are not much more than conjecture based on one person's perception of what could have been.

Originally Posted by uniface

Distribution : For what it's worth, the current "book" on Clovis is that it is not defined (or definable) by fluted points, but by lamellar core and blade technology. In the book (Clovis Technology) I posted the heads-up about, they have Clovis reaching only as far Northeast as Virginia, West Virginia and Southwestern Ohio. Fluted points are found beyond that line (even up into Maine and Nova Scotia), but not the diagnostic blade technology.

That is very interesting. Of all the Clovis sites in Maryland and northward, there is NO blade technology evidence? I've never heard that. If true it is yet another very confusing aspect of the larger picture we know so little about. Of course some folks would use that as evidence pointing to an Atlantic crossing by early non-blade based cultures.

[paleo_joe]

Yeah, I was just looking at the rate of technological diffusion out of curiosity. There are a lot of factors involved and not too many examples to study in the artifact world.

Typically in technology management things follow an "S" curve, where you have a few innovators and early adopters, then a steep increase as the majority gets on board, then a leveling off as the laggards finally adopt it. Cell phones are a good example.

I can see maize following this, but not the clovis point. The diffusion curve on it seems almost straight up. Nobody to everyone, lickety-split.

[uniface]

Of all the Clovis sites in Maryland and northward, there is NO blade technology evidence?

For the most part, no. There were some at Shoop I'd consider blades, for example, but people argue over them. Many places, there are none. It's a complicated argument.

[wiseshanks]

I think it would be interesting to know the movements of the game that the Clovis people hunted. Was it a north/south pattern? I think that it's reasonable to conclude that a nomadic group could disperse a certain technology across the continent within a 200 year time span. Especially if it worked. And I think if they traveled from...wherever they came from, they were good at moving vast distances. As far as the influence Clovis technology had on future styles, that I cannot answer. I just think we're gonna have to be patient and archaeology will do the rest.